Glossary

If it’s the first time you choose a web hosting, you might be a bit lost with the amount of words used in this niche. To facilitate a little bit your work, we have created a glossary of words you should know about.

Hosting: service offered by a company to host your website. This is where your website will be.

Domain: a domain is the name used to access a website. TopBestHostings.com is a domain. To have a website, you need to buy at least a domain. Hosting providers can let you host more than a domain on the same account, so paying only one hosting you might have several websites with multiple domains.

Storage (Disk Space): space in the hard drive that the hosting company allows you for your website files. Same way as your documents and images use some space in your computer, websites use documents and images that must be saved somewhere. Hosting companies “let you” use their hard drives to save your website files.The more space, the better.

Transfer or Bandwith: quantity of information that your website can send or receive. If in your website you have a picture that is 1MegaByte, and you receive 100 visits in a month, you will have consumed 100MegaBytes of Bandwith, since 100 people “downloaded”this image. It’s a hard concept to understand to many people. The more Bandwith, the better.

PHP: if your server has PHP, it means you can execute PHP files. If you don’t know what’s this, you probably don’t need it. If you want to use a Content Management System like blogs or WordPress, then you need PHP in your hosting.

MySQL Databases: databases are used to store information in an structure way. MySQL is a kind of database very popular among websites, since it’s free. If you want to use any Content Management System like blogs or WordPress, you need a hosting with MySQL. The more databases you are allowed to have, the better.

Email Accounts: email accounts are used to send and receive emails using your domain, for example information@topbesthostings.com is an email account. If you want to be able to send and receive emails using your domain, make sure your hosting allows multiple emails accounts. The more email accounts allowed, the better.

Shared Hosting (or Server): budget option for to host a website. This means sharing resources with other websites, let’s say with 2,000. Of course, if a websites uses more resources, it will affect the rest. These servers are more likely to go down and performance is a bit lower – although most websites won’t even notice the difference. Unless your visits are high, this is the most recommended option. It costs around $5/month

VPS Hosting (or Server): Stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s not really private, but shared among 10-20 websites. Performance is split into users; so for example, a server can allocate each user 2GB of RAM. It costs around $15/month

Cloud Hosting: it’s a type of VPS Hosting. It basically allows to use resources of the rest of websites in the same servers, when these are not being used. It’s basically an upgrade from VPS, and it’s what Amazon and Google use for their servers.

Dedicated Hosting (or Server): this is a server for a single user. As an advantage, it allows a better customization. As a disadvantage, it requires further knowledge about servers, since the configuration is not “one fits all” but a personalized one. Dedicated servers are the best option for flexibility and control, as long as one knows how to set it up properly. I would say you only need this in case of wanting extreme privacy on your data, or if you have very specific hardware requirements.

And that’s all for now! If you have any doubt, please leave us a message below and we’ll be have to help you.